This morning I’m strangely, incongruously happy.  That’s a good place to start.  I feel like I’m in the very early planning stages of a long around-the-world trip – that first anticipatory excitement that Some Big Adventure Is On The Way, and it’s just a matter of time before you board the flight and take off for parts unknown.  Literally: unknown.  Close my eyes and throw darts at a map.  Not knowing whether to pick up the Spanish-, Japanese-, or Tongan-to-English dictionary.  I know where I would prefer to go, what I would like to see printed on my boarding pass, but at this point everything is up in the air.

Do you remember, as kids, when you’d play checkers or chess and your move wasn’t “for real” until you took your fingers off the piece?  So you’d make your move, then rethink, have second thoughts, dilly-dally, all the while keeping one stretched-out index finger in contact.  Then, with a flourish, you’d remove your hand.  I feel a bit like that right now.  I courageously (or stupidly?)  moved my King out from safety, took my fingers from his crown, and now am waiting to see what White will do in response.  In an abstract way of thinking, it doesn’t matter what the counter-move is; in another, very real sense, everything depends on it.  It’s the difference between thinking things are going to be OK someday vs. that things are going to be better soon.

I spent a toss-and-turn night in bed and got very little sleep, but feel refreshed this morning anyway.  Outlook and perspective makes all the difference.  Did I move my King too soon?  Should I have moved my King at all?  Should I have retreated back behind the wall of pawns?  It’s all sort of moot at this point. I feel good about my move, no matter the result.

I ended up getting up about 4:30 and got to the gym about 10 minutes before they opened.  I ran 4+ miles on the treadmill, enough to sweat and move and breathe and feel alive, but not so much that I’m tired.

Today should be fairly relaxed, work-wise: our team is ahead of schedule; my side projects are going well; and it’s Friday.  Yay!  Still have no idea as of this moment what the weekend might hold.  We’ll see.

Hope you’re having a great morning yourself, dear reader.

Much like exercise, I’m beginning to get to that point where if I don’t write every day I start to feel like something is missing.  Even a simple little blog post can scratch that itch.

So – what’s up in Anthony-land?  Anthonyville?  Anthonytropolis?  Not much, and yet everything.  I had a birthday yesterday – if you haven’t yet sent in your present, SHAME ON YOU , and it was very nice.  Parts of the day were extra special, and – I’ll leave it at that.  I also got 10 hours of sleep last night, which helped make the day nice on a couple different levels.  Oh my god, here I go again with the cryptic narrative.  I just can’t spill my guts out all over the page EVERY DAY or pretty soon you’d go back to reading Scoble or Pavlina or god knows who else, out of sheer disgust.

I had a good day.  I’ll stop there.  But let me repeat: it was good.  That’s unusual, and welcome.  I want to bottle it and apply it in short bursts throughout the week.

I’ve been working yesterday afternoon and this morning on a side project that involves digging through level after level of superfluous complexity that puts everything else I’ve ever seen to shame.  I saw a Coen Brothers film recently, a bad one, called “A Serious Man”, and one of the characters is developing a mathematical probability theory in a book he calls The Mentaculus.  The book is really just page after page of scribbled numbers in various patterns – lists, columns, whirls, vortices, spirals.  To look at it is to immediately wish one were taking hallucinogenic drugs, in hopes of discovering The Secret To The Universe.  Anyway, this code I’m looking at reminds me of The Mentaculus.  I’m imagining the guy who wrote it wears an Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and wears two pairs of glasses at a time, just in case. I only have the benefit of two dry cappuccinos to help me navigate the waters.  I’m slowly going insane.

I’m looking forward to working more tonight and this weekend.  Now that I’ve half-cracked the code, I can start to feel productive and hopefully get in that flow state.  I may take some time Saturday morning to go on a long bike ride, if it’s not too rainy.  I have a couple destinations in mind, and will have to make some plans before I go to bed on Friday.  Can I do 50 miles this weekend?  Why not?  I can do anything.

Everything else?  What’s the French word for shit?  Merde?  Yeah, that.  So I’m focusing on what’s good, what I can control, and what I can revel in, take delight in, and what I can do for others.  The secret to  happiness is not absence of merde; it’s accepting the notion that despite the merde, there are still areas of your life that are good; friendships that make you happy; circumstances that one can appreciate; needs of others that you can fill.

So I’m working on it.  Wish me luck.   Hope you’re having a great day!

Tomorrow, November 4th, I turn 38.  Another milestone, although birthdays become FAR less important as you get older, and especially when you have kids and all the household birthday-energy gets transferred to making their birthdays the special occasions.

But as a milestone, it naturally lends itself to questions like “what has happened in the past year?” “what’s been good?” “what’s been not-so-good?” and so on.

I can say with the straightest of faces that this has been perhaps the most turbulent year of my life, for a variety of reasons. Some of the items have been so personal that even an open-the-kimono blogger like me avoids discussing them, while others are what you might call fit for public consumption.  It doesn’t really matter the reasons.  Whether or not I could describe my year as “The Greatest Story Ever Told” or “Les Miserables”, a finished book is still in some sense a finished book, no matter what words were printed on its pages.  And I would really like to shelve this  book and move on to #38, hopefully with fewer repeat performances and more … newness.  More excitement.  More inspiration.  More mutuality.  More …. lots more of a lot of things.  The list is endless, and personal.

I will say one thing that went exceedingly well for me this past year – my fitness program.  That is one new thing I’ll carry over to the next year without question.  I’ve also made some wonderful new friends which I’m very grateful for.  I’ve been blogging very consistently and frequently.  I’ve learned a lot of new things in my profession and made a lot of great contacts.  I’ve excelled at my job.  I’ve been karmically rewarded with two very happy, healthy kids in whom I take the utmost delight.

Yet thinking about it further, maybe the best thing that happened to me was a novel, never-before-experienced sense of self-discovery.  I’ve always been introspective, but this year I probed depths that I didn’t even suspect existed. I learned a TON about myself, both during how I dealt with good times as well as bad times.  I learned (relearned?) what’s important to me.  I have a renewed sense of who I am, what I need, and what I want.  I think I still have a ways to go in terms of improving my ability to act on my convictions, but I’ve come a long way.

What’s not gone so well?  Better not to dwell on the negatives.  Acknowledge, yes; obsess, no.  There are too many opportunities in life to make oneself unhappy that one shouldn’t go around borrowing trouble.  I do hope, and suspect, that many of the lessons learned in year 37 will stick with me for a long time.

I’m too old and cynical to hope that tomorrow, when I wake up, everything will have changed for the better, all the leaves turned over, all the dust swept out from the recesses of my mind.  All I can hope is that tomorrow is better than today, and that the day after that will be better still; like a retirement fund, happiness is sometimes a long-term proposition and one has to be patient and wait out rough spots and have enough confidence that one can make it through to the other side as unscathed as best as one can.  So let’s hope that we’ve experienced the bottom of the market and that the bull market has already begun.

What do I want for my birthday?  Ah, if I told, then according to the birthday-wish tradition, those things most certainly wouldn’t come to pass.  But what I want is impossible for the moment anyway.  So I won’t dwell on wanting; instead, I’ll turn my focus to appreciating those things in my life that are already true, already make me happy and already make sense.

I’ll stop doing this soon, I promise, but I’m still a little giddy when I see my name and photo on the front page of the Seattle 2.0 website:

You can read the whole blog post here.  Leave a comment!

These great quotes have flown by on my tweetstream recently:

”If you don’t like where you are, change it! You’re not a tree.”

“When looking at Switching Costs . . . don’t forget to consider Switching Gains (emotional, social, psychological, etc.)”

On a related note, I finished my second blog post for Seattle 2.0 this morning.  It should go live tomorrow morning at 6 AM.  The topic is the Endowment Effect and whether or not we can use this hypothesis to explain any resistance to making the leap and starting your own business.  On this blog, however, my interests for the moment lean more in a personal direction, and I wonder if the EE can explain resistance to change in general.  I think it can.  I think the EE makes sense and that we overvalue what we currently have and undervalue that which we might potentially have were we to make changes.

I was interested, but not surprised, to find that one of the primary experimental evidence sets in favor of the EE was developed by Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational.  I’m familiar with Dan from his writings on happiness and I think I’ve even blogged about him a couple times in these pages.

Speaking of change, I was talking to a friend this morning who has an interest in astrology and was told that “transformation” is a key concept for Scorpios and that we tend to seek out cycles of change, rebirth, reinvention…I’m not a believer in astrology as such, but since I’ve lately been thinking a lot about change and transformation, I was interested to hear her out.

Thought-experiment: If I had to pick ONE THING today to change about myself or my circumstances, what would it be, and why?  As I ponder this question, I will get back to work… Hope you all are having a great day today.

My kids have been scheduled to get baptized this morning at St. Mark’s Cathedral, but, as will happen with kids, plans have to change.  My son Will has fallen ill with the flu; he’s been running a fever as high as 103F for several days.   So, the new plan is to have Audrey baptized by herself, while I stay home and take care of Will.

This is a bummer on several levels, not least of which is that I’ll have to miss my daughter’s special moment.  It’s also sad that they won’t have the day to share with each other – they’re so close. But kids get sick, plans have to change, and a parent’s second-most-important ability (#1: patience!) is to be adaptable.

The next baptism day at St. Mark’s is January 10th, or the First Sunday after Epiphany.  He’ll have to wait a couple months, but the little guy will have his own special day to remember.

I’ve been making my way (slowly) through Pynchon’s Against The Day and thought this passage was a riot:

“Everything you appreciate with your senses, all there is in the given world to hold dear, the faces of your children, sunsets, rain, fragrances of earth, a good laugh, the touch of a lover, the blood of an enemy; your mother’s cooking, wine, music, athletic triumphs, desirable strangers, the body you feel at home in, a sea-breeze flowing over unclothed skin – all these for the devout Manichaean are evil, creations of an evil deity, phantoms and masks that have always belonged to time and excrement and darkness.”

“But it’s everything that matters,” protested Chick Counterfly.

“And a true follower of this faith had to give it all up.  No sex, not even marriage; no children, no family ties.  These being only tricks of the Darkness, there to distract us from seeking union with the Light.”

“That’s the choice?  Light or pussy? What kind of choice is that?”

“Suckling!”

“Sorry Lindsay, I meant ‘vagina’, of course!”

ROFL

The last twenty-four hours have been an absolute study in constrasts – professional, personal, emotional, psychological, physical.  Blacks and whites thrown together violently against the canvas, Pollock-like, creating a blast sequence of muddy opaque grays, waves of indecipherable maybes, decisions made and unmade, promises kept and unkept, notions held and then abandoned, nothing certain, nothing transparent, nothing predictable…

Let me start off with the good part of the story.  As many of my regular readers know, I’ve been exercising like a maniac on meth, having recently completed a 100-day-in-a-row personal challenge.  One of my goals (developed late in the cycle) was to attend my company’s Halloween party in a toga.  This would be a neat milestone to hit – to be able to show off my hard-won physical improvements with a little bared-shoulder action.  The Halloween party was last night, and up until Wednesday I didn’t even know for sure that I would be going (long story).  But Wednesday evening, I went to Jo-Ann’s Fabrics, bought several yards of red gabardine and white muslin, and spent a terrified few minutes Thursday afternoon furiously safety-pinning everything together before the short drive up the hill to the Shaffer-Ballie Mansion where the party was held.

I walked in. I held my breath.  Could I pull this off?  Being overweight plays hell with your confidence, and even though I’ve lost well over sixty pounds this year, I’m still not thin by any means.  Thinner, yes.  Not thin.  Could I possibly be toga-thin?

Somewhat surprisingly, things went well.  I felt comfortable.  I felt- dare I say it? – Attractive?  Confident?  I received quite a few compliments on the costume and on my physique.  I actually enjoyed participating in the costume contest (think of the Zoolander “walk-off” scene, except no one pulled their underwear off with one hand).  I even got a few “best costume” votes, but was nowhere near winning – there were a couple AMAZING costumes that people had put lots of time and thought into.

I would love to end this blog post now, with me in a toga feeling pretty good about myself, except the story doesn’t end with a successful Halloween party.  I can’t say much in the way of details, but, as John Nash might have said in A Beautful Mind, I got “nuclearfied” after the party – as in, a bomb got dropped, and I was the Hiroshima in the equation.

I then spent the rest of an anxious evening watching wistful tumbleweeds blow by in my imagination, aimless, purposeless, feeling like an outsider in my own person, uncomfortable, distant, distanced, pressing my nose up against the window in my mind, viewing a foreign cityscape filled with people I didn’t know doing things I couldn’t see, observing contented burghers conduct business in a language I couldn’t understand, and thinking how complex and awesome and wonderful and occasionally painful-as-shit the human experience can be.

I woke at 3:30.  Yes, my insomnia has returned in the last month.  A couple times lately I’ve thrown my hands up and said “fuck it” and went into work, since the gym isn’t open that early.  Lucky for me, Will woke up and crawled in next to me right at that time, so I had a reason to stay in bed until 4:45, when I went to the gym and ran my ass off.  Lately, quite often, I’ve tried to beat back the blahs with intense exercise, with just so-so success.  This was the case this morning – I felt tired, but still bombed-out, a hollow shell, filled with insubstantial confusion and angst and feeling tremendously un-prescient.

Work today was slow and I spent an ineffectual day fixing a bug here, responding to a request there, writing some code, but never getting in the flow.  My stomach started to get upset just before lunchtime, and I thought I was going all mental and making myself ill, but then I got a text that said my son Will had puked all over the back of the car, so the physical symptoms were probably real and indicative of some incipient flu.  I went home early and napped for a few hours with my sick boy.  I woke up not feeling pukey, but not very hungry either, but, having eaten very little earlier in the day, I ate a salmon sandwich at Zoka, where I’ve been camped out for the last few hours.

What did I learn?  What can I learn?  It seems to me that quite often, we learn all the lessons we need way earlier than we actually decide to apply them.  I think we have an innate ability to see truth, but a pretty crappy capacity to follow down the path that truth would lead us.  We’re victims – we’re our own victims – of inertia, distraction, and denial.

Again, another novel has proceeded, Athena-like, from my keyboard.  I apologize.   Sometimes, the words just flow, and I’ve felt better for having vomited my day out on the page.  You, dear reader, are probably feeling very put upon for having had to read through said vomit, but forgive me and we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow…

Renowned photographer Chase Jarvis is featured in an interview on SilberStudios.tv, Marc Silber’s photography site.  In it, Chase talks photo tips, and also gets a chance to show his new book, “The Best Camera”, his new iPhone app, which he developed with the assistance of some of my friends in the industry; and, about a third of the way in, there’s a glimpse of the website http://thebestcamera.com.  I played a very small part in bringing that website live with some creative client-side Javascript/Ajax/CSS work.

If you’re a photography buff you might want to check it out, and bookmark Marc’s site for future reference as well.

http://www.silberstudios.tv/msps/chase-jarvis-best-camera-tips/

(h/t @scobleizer)

I was super pleased to read this notice about Adometry in this morning’s Northwest Innovation e-mail newsletter:

Kirkland-based Adometry, a new startup focused on providing metrics for online display and rich media ads, said Wednesday that it has raised a round of angel funding, and has launched its software-as-a-service product. The firm said its product–Veracity–provides metrics for advertisers, publishers, and others to allow advertisers to be more effective in their ad campaigns. As part of the funding, the firm said it has hired on Jim Ewel, former CEO and Chairman of GoAhead Software, as its CEO. Ewel also has served at Microsoft. Adometry was founded by John Dietz and Robert Perrier. A regulatory filing from last month indicates the
funding was worth $400,000.

I’ve known John and Robert for a while and have watched as they have tirelessly worked to build Adometry.  Great job in securing the funding, launching your first product, and bringing on a CEO, guys!

UPDATE: Here’s the TechFlash article with the same announcement.